A Very Natural Thing

Sep 20, 2016 — Cloaked in chiaroscuro and innuendo, this stylistically innovative creature feature leaves its greatest horrors to the imagination.

Mar 15, 2011 — In Edward Yang’s cinema in general, and in Yi Yi in particular, character and environment are inseparable.

Oct 24, 2005 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s great film flirts with macho extremism and slips over into dream and poetry just as it has us most alarmed.

Nov 17, 1986 — The best of all the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn comedies, Adam’s Rib is as fresh and topical today as it was in 1949 when it was first released. Written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin and directed by George Cukor, this...

Feb 13, 2024 — Through its echoes, resonances, and intricately branching stories, this cycle of films evokes the feeling that life, like the weather, is based on patterns too complex to ever be fully predictable.

May 24, 2022 — While some critics expected more gore, others see a wryly wise reflection on our biological future.

May 18, 2018 — Improvising to Jim Jarmusch’s film in real time, Neil Young created a rich parallel environment that sounds like a force of nature.

May 6, 2021 — Fame, as the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño once observed, is reductive. “Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished,” he wrote in 2666, an epic novel published after his death.What Bolaño identified as the...

Apr 2, 2021 — One Scene Thomas Vinterberg no longer holds fast to the ascetic tenets of Dogme 95, the film movement he cofounded in 1995 with fellow Danish director Lars von Trier, but what has remained constant throughout his career is his sharp...

Oct 23, 2017 — “Meet the new hotshots of American filmmaking,” offers the Observer, stacking four profiles on one page. Tim Lewis gets Dee Rees talking about Mudbound (“The mud wasn’t free!”) and going with Netflix: “I think Netflix are disrupters and maybe they...